The Brightest One
by star wars for Jesus
Summary: What truly happened to Ahsoka Tano before her ambiguous departure in "Twilight of the Apprentice?" Wonder no more, for here are the events, portrayed in detail. (And yes, this is my first fanfiction in over two years.)


**_"_** ** _Love can ignite the stars."—Matthew Stover_**

This is the death of Ahsoka Tano:

Deep underground, she is far from any natural source of light, from any moon or star. There is no sky above her like the wide, stretching expanse she knew as a girl on Shili, before Master Plo discovered her; instead, there is only cold, dark stone overhead. In fact, that is all everything is, down here. There is no green, no life—no birds chanting melodies overhead, no grass to act as a cushion beneath her feet. This place only has darkness, as well as the utter emptiness of a space devoid of life.

The space around her, though—the places she cannot she with her eyes—feels different. Something is there, swimming around her, enfolding her. Closing in on her, like a hunter narrowing in on its unsuspecting prey. But because she knows where she is, she has long been vigilant for its approach, and she has prepared for it.

It is the dark side.

Or, more precisely, the absence of the light.

Once, this place was a Sith Temple, a stronghold for those who wielded the dark side of the Force. As such, everything—from the cavern itself to the frigid air whispering over her skin—is steeped in the dark, like a battlefield that has been soaked in blood. Even the souls of the Jedi who once died here, killed at the same moment as the Sith they slew, do not cut into the dark's heavy, cloying stench. Those Jedi souls—lost so long ago—almost make the taint of the dark side that much worse; she can sense them wafting aimlessly about the cavern that is the Sith Temple, forever entrapped within its darkness.

How they maintained their consciousness after death, however, is beyond Ahsoka. According to all she has been taught, it impossible for a being to retain individuality after death; dead souls are supposedly fed into the Cosmic Force, where they will bleed together and be transformed into another form. Her Jedi instructors always told her that the process is somewhat akin to paints being mixed on a painter's palette: the colors are not destroyed, per se, but they do lose their uniqueness when they are brought together. Yellow and red become a blazing orange sunset; red and blue become a violet petal; blue and yellow become a brilliant emerald gem.

The point of the metaphor was to stress that beings lose nothing in death—or, more precisely, that death itself was nonexistent, for no being is ever truly destroyed. Yet Ahsoka, like many others, could never shake the feeling that the Jedi were wrong. Perhaps there was such a thing as death. Moreover, perhaps there was something after it, a place that was beyond everything she had ever known. Master Yoda, after all, had always made it clear that the light in the universe emanated from somewhere; maybe that source, which had always remained elusive to the Jedi, was hidden in the place they insisted did not exist.

Right now, though, the present moment has its own light.

That light is Ahsoka Tano.

In a cavern swollen with darkness, she stands as the lone candle. She is not the sole light side-wielder here, of course; in front of her, Ezra and Kanan hobble toward their escape vessel, the former guiding the latter to ensure that he does not lose his way. But right now, in this moment, she is the only one who is truly ablaze. It as if the Force itself has converged on her in this moment, acting as the catalyst which has transformed her from a dying ember into a super nova, poised to burst with the light smoldering within.

In the back of her mind, she is aware that super novas are temporary, even more so than the flame of a candle. A candle, after all, can be fed; its wick can be lengthened, or additional fuel can be given to it. The super nova, on the other hand, has an expiration date. Although it burns brightly, it will soon expend its fuel and die out—just as the star that created it has died, and leaves in its place the all-consuming void of a black hole.

Ahsoka knows all this, on some level—but she does not care. For she has come to understand that although her light is temporary, it must shine nonetheless. Her entire life, from the moment Master Plo first told her of the Force to the here and now, has led up to this moment. This—the present moment, the bright and wonderful and brilliant _now_ enfolding her like a cloak-is the sum of her existence. She was, although she has never realized it until this moment, created for what is about to happen.

The moment she heard Anakin Skywalker's voice emanate from where Vader stood behind her, head bowed, she knew why she had been born. All of a sudden, it was if she could see the events of her life displayed before her in a web, each and every moment interweaving seamlessly with the next. She could see how every instance had fed into the next: Master Plo bringing her to the Temple had led to her becoming Anakin's apprentice; becoming Anakin's apprentice had been what caused her to leave the Order; and leaving the Order is what has led her here.

It is ironic, that leaving the Order behind is what has transformed her into the Jedi's brightest light—that renouncing her status as a Jedi would mean that today, she would become the greatest Jedi the galaxy has yet to see. But Ahsoka, who has grown wiser than perhaps the likes of Yoda himself, knows better than to see this as simple irony. Over the years, she has come to realize that the Force works in ways that are far beyond mortal comprehension; it uses the unlikely things of the universe to generate unimaginable good, sometimes in ways no one would suspect. Like how a slave boy from a backwater world would one day become the cornerstone of the entire galaxy, with the power to tip the scales toward either light or darkness.

Granted, Ahsoka does not understand how any of this is possible. She does not see how one man, albeit an extraordinarily powerful man, can be what stands in the crossroads of the cosmos. He is, after all, just a man—and that is no more evident than right now, when she turns to see his human face peering out of the black armor that encases him. And yet despite her lack understanding, she grasps this truth more firmly than anything she has ever known, as if the Force itself has opened her eyes and allowed her to see what so many supposedly wiser beings failed to notice.

The truth, as she now sees it, is this:

Despite being steeped in darkness, Anakin Skywalker will be the greatest force of good the galaxy has seen in millennia.

Perhaps it has never even seen something comparable to the whirlwind of light Skywalker is poised to bring to the galaxy.

This is why Ahsoka, when her comrades urge her to join them before the Temple itself is lost in the explosion mounting in its core, decides to stay.

As Ezra calls out to her, pleading with her to flee the Temple, she knows in her heart of hearts that she will not leave Anakin Skywalker behind. She cannot, not even if she wanted to. It is as if the Force has woven her fate with Anakin's, making her as much the cornerstone of his destiny as he is the cornerstone of the galaxy, setting her at the crossroads of their entwined destinies. What she chooses right now—whether she chooses to flee or remain—will goad Anakin toward one side or the other, toward the dark or toward the light.

But then again, she does not feel as though she has a choice, for it feels to her as though the events here have already been set. As if they have already been determined, long before her birth. Rather than being the one who holds the balance of galactic events in her open palm, she is instead a stone that is being carried along a river bed, following a course that she cannot even hope to alter. To think that she could do so would be like assuming that she is what is keeping her heart alive rather than the other way round.

So gazing into Anakin's one visible eye—the part of him that is not completely shrouded in darkness-she declares with the unshakable certainty that absolute truth affords, "I won't leave you. Not this time."

Once, she did just that—she left him behind. Even now, she can remember that day as vividly as she can see Anakin now, scrutinizing her with his amber glare: she remembers turning her back to him and walking off, toward the city beyond. Walking until she faded out of his vision, obscured by the distance between them.

Right now, she will not turn her back.

Right now, she will face him—even if doing so involves staring into the lightless abyss Anakin has become.

And yet the abyss is not entirely without light. Even without her, whose blaze has reached a crescendo so brilliant, so bright that the stars themselves would be envious, there is still a trace amount of light emanating from him. To be sure, his light is weak, almost to the point of flickering out. Of dying. But dying, as she has come to see, is not the same as dead. As long as life remains, hope abides there with it, giving it fuel. Like a breath of air, hope stokes the flames, encouraging a tiny, fading ember to grow into a raging inferno. Shaping the dying star into a super nova, a burst of light that is so unimaginably potent that for at least one shining moment, even the emptiest black hole cannot pull it in.

In a second that stretches out into an eternity, she glimpses that tiny spark of light in him, and holds onto it. Right now, he is not only examining her, as if he is trying to make sense of what she has become; right now, he is trying to make sense of himself. He is trying, despite the weight of the dark side bearing down on his soul, to determine if there is some hint of what he once was, before he embraced evil. Before he fell. Moreover, he is waiting to see if there is any way that he could climb his way back up, find his way out of the cave—and maybe, just maybe, come back into the sun. Perhaps he is even trying to remember the sun, for it is likely that he has remained in the dark for quite some time. Has become so adapted to the absence of light that he has made no provisions for its actual presence. Standing there, sifting through his very self, he is not unlike the deep sea Naboo fauna that Ahsoka researched during her studies at the Jedi Temple: he has been hidden from the light so long that he has lost his ability to see it.

Anakin Skywalker is blind to the light she can still see in him.

Ahsoka knows this because she detects the slightest shift in his gaze. Where there was once a softening, a flicker of goodness making its way to the surface, there is now nothing, as if everything about him has been jettisoned into the cold of space. If she is the super nova, poised to explode in a violent burst of light, he is the inevitable black hole that follows. He will, in the end, pull her in, devour her. After all, nothing escapes the grip of a black hole—not a single photon of light. According to some of the Jedi archives, there are even a few scientists who theorize that eventually, every star in the universe will collapse into a black hole, consuming all existing matter. Eating and eating until there is nothing left to eat.

But even then, that matter is never truly destroyed; it simply goes to another place.

The truth of this washes over Ahsoka, granting her a measure of peace when Anakin Skywalker metamorphoses once more into Darth Vader, and he says, "Then you will die." She does not feel this way because she denies the existence of death, as the Jedi taught her to do; as Vader lumbers toward her, in fact, she sees that the Jedi were clearly mistaken on the subject. In her mind, there is no transforming into the Cosmic Force, no mixing of colors on the palette. Instead, she realizes that things do not change forms—they cease to be. Or at least they cease to exist in the present realm, the place that she can detect with her senses.

Ahsoka does not see death as an illusion because she is staring it straight in the face.

Vader is going to cause her death.

Even as she continues her duel with Vader, her blades of pure white sparking against his single, blood-red blade, she sees that this is inevitable. He is going to kill her. End her. Granted, she cannot yet see how, because the Force has yet to show her this—but although she is ignorant of the details, she simply knows this as a fact. It is as if she is reading a predictable novel, one where she can tell how the story is going to end, even before she turns the final page.

She has always been destined to die here.

With this in mind, she ignores Ezra's final plea for her to board the escape shuttle, to fly away into the not-so-distant sky. Reaching out with the Force, she closes the shuttle's door, preventing the boy or Kanan from hurrying back to her side. From assisting her. If either of them were to do so, they would most likely die—either at Vader's hand, or from the explosion that is surely going to burst from the Temple's heart—and that is something she cannot allow. Or perhaps it is something the Force cannot allow; with the light side surging through her like a storm, she cannot distinguish where her will ends and where the will of the Force begins. The line dividing them has become blurred, as if part of her is slipping away.

Perhaps it is—but not in the way the Jedi would have suspected. In fact, she does believe that even Master Yoda, for all his lauded wisdom and power, could not achieve what she now has. Where the wizened old Master believed that death was what someone to lose individuality, Ahsoka's sense of self dissipates because she is looking outward, toward the hulking black nightmare bearing down on her. She is no longer in the foreground of her life, the center of her own personal universes; rather, Vader has become so central in her consciousness that she is hardly aware of herself. The only self-related thought that comes to mind is that at whatever cost, her destiny is to keep Anakin alive—and in the present moment, this means protecting Vader. Vader is only a shell, after all; within lies Anakin Skywalker.

The details of her end are now becoming evident.

With a faint, wry smile, Ahsoka silently chides herself for not realizing this sooner. Right now, it seems obvious, blatantly so. This was always where she was headed—where she has been heading all her life, from the days she ran barefoot across Shili's golden fields to this moment, when the Temple's core finally ruptures. When it at last burst outward in a surge of energy, threatening to obliterate everything in its path.

She is in its path.

Vader is in its path.

Until he isn't.

Using the wave of light side energy that has mounted to a crescendo within her, Ahsoka levels a Force blast at Vader. The blow hits him straight in the chest, and he is knocked from his feet, falling to the ground behind her. He curses at her for doing so, because he mostly likely thinks that she has done this to have the last word, as it were—to have the satisfaction of killing him before she herself is killed by the explosion. But right now, satisfying herself is the last thing on Ahsoka Tano's mind. Rather, she has placed selfish thoughts in the back of her mind as she focuses on using every last ounce of Force power she has to pull the explosion away from Vader.

And into herself.

Like the black holes that some believe will eventually consume the universe, she draws the energy from the blast into herself, absorbing it. It burns, going into her—burns worse than she imagines of one the nine Corellian Hells would feel. She can feel her insides compressing, forced together by the pressure of the explosion, and she wonders briefly if this is what it's like to be placed in a trash compactor, to be scrunched and pressed like this. Most likely, it is—only magnified one thousand fold. Being caught in a trash compactor only involves having your physical body crushed; this is crushing her very life-force, to point that it feels like a fist has closed around her soul.

When she was still Anakin's apprentice, he told her that a Jedi Master had done something similar to what she is now doing—had done it for Anakin, even. He had been a boy then, still apprenticed to Obi-Wan Kenobi, with his fall to the dark side still in his distant future. From what she has been told, Anakin was extremely reckless in those days—or at least less so than he was when she knew him—so it was through no lack of trying that he had found himself in danger: in the pathway of a bomb, to be more precise. On multiple occasions, Anakin has admitted that in that instant, he was certain that everything was going to end, that he was about to die and that there was nothing he could do to change the fact. But in the final seconds before detonation, an elderly Jedi Master named Yaddle—a female member of Yoda's species—leapt between him and the bomb, absorbing the energy of the blast into her own tiny body. Contrary to Anakin's expectations, however, absorbing the blast did not caused her to explode or break apart; rather, according to Anakin's recollections, she imploded. Crumpled in on herself until she simply winked out of existence.

The main difference between now and then, however, is that Yaddle sacrificed herself for an innocent. For a child who had yet to cause any real harm to the world. Prior to inadvertently causing Yaddle's death, Ahsoka isn't even certain that Anakin had even hurt anyone else, save for moments when he had distressed his master with his customary defiance. He was, Ahsoka believes, the polar opposite of the man with her now—the man she is now dying to save—for this man…well, Ahsoka has heard the stories. She has heard rumors of the atrocities committed by Vader, has caught wind of the whispered legends about the countless hundreds who have personally died at his hand—and she suspects most of these tales are true. After all, the ones perpetuating the rumors are not Imperial PR teams bent on producing pro-Empire propaganda; they come from the mouths of Rebels who have witnessed, first hand, the utter darkness within Vader.

Yaddle died for a saint.

Ahsoka is dying for a man who slashes saints' throats.

A lesser person, upon recognizing this truth, would become bitter. It would be so unjust to him, this sacrifice for a veritable devil. It would be so… _unfair_. The worse man, the one who reeks of the dark, should die for the good man—or even for the man who is only moderately decent. A good man, after all, is more deserving than a depraved one. Ahsoka, in fact, does not deny this truth; she even embraces it. But if she learnt anything from her time in the mortal realm, it is that a truly good person does not take a being's perceived worthiness or unworthiness into account. The person who is good through and through seeks what is best for every being—and sometimes, that involves being merciful to an enemy. Or showing him untold kindness.

Or doing both, as Ahsoka is now.

In her final few seconds, Ahsoka uses the last of her remaining strength to turn toward Vader. She does not want to have her back to him. Not this time. If these are to be her last few moments, she does not want them to be stinging with the pain of regret, or burdened with the weight of a promise left unfulfilled. For she has promised that she will never again leave him—and part of that promise entails being with him, staying by his side.

It means looking at his face.

"Goodbye, Skyguy," she says, and then in a burst of light so brilliant that every shadow in the Temple retreats, her body is gone.

But she is not.


End file.
